CCR

 

1.      How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?

Our commercial does a critical thing to challenge current conventions and Wendy’s commercial standards as a whole by breaking the fourth wall and trying to connect with the audience on a deeper level. This commercial tries to talk directly to the audience through comedy, which time and time again has shown that it is a proficient way of connecting with audiences, young and old and getting more buyers of a product, no matter what that product is. Humor has proved such a strong catalyst for consumerism that comedy has been a potent tool in any advertiser’s belt of strategies. Knowing this, we made a unanimous decision that our commercial would include humor as a main draw and hopefully that everything would go well. Thankfully, it did. Sadly, our commercial did not to anything revolutionary in the terms of social reforms or political issues, but we were not trying to go for such a hard-hitting point, as we were more trying to sell chicken nuggets than trying to raise protest in the streets. We decided against this because we are aware of the controversy surrounding other companies who have tried to do something as drastic as that, such as Pepsi with the infamous commercial that made their stocks drop by a staggering amount for a simple commercial with a simple view. Ignoring any social issues proved to be a positive, as we as a team were able to focus and pin down the answers to many questions plaguing our project at the time: Thankfully, all of these questions were answered and more.

 

2. How does your product engage with audiences AND how would it be distributed as a real media text?

 

      This product appeals to millennial humor by being funny and random. This new form of humor has been proven effective multiple times in the past and is now at the forefront of many advertising firms current and most likely future strategies for outsourced advertising jobs. This new, flashy and colorful approach is now a mainstream affair. Our team decided to try and appeal this 49-year company to a new generation through this humor, and we feel like we succeeded. Further playing into this strategy, we would focus less on television ads and focus more on social media prevalence. This is because television viewership numbers have been steadily dwindling in the past few decades and we would want as many trendy and younger people seeing our advertisement as much as possible, as another part of advertising is to grab the viewers attention as quickly as you can, because the information getting into the watchers brain is more important than the watcher seeing the advert as a whole. When the main topic is put in front of the user immediately when they crave something or have a problem they will hopefully think immediately to that funny time they were introduced to the product and hopefully be a future customer. Our product engages with the audience beautifully, through humor.

 

 

3.      How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

 

            My Production skills developed exponentially throughout the length of this project because this was my first introduction to filmmaking and all of its aspects. This class went through all of the film making processes, such as editing, filming, acting and even finding the right music for the video. Every single detail was carefully curated by the tail end of the project, and everyone in our group was at least proficient in the programs we used and the camera angles and even our line. The great thing about this class is that it compresses down the complete filmmaking process into bite sized chunks, allowing us students to experience an often multi million-multi-year job in only a few days with the camera equipment being provided for by the school, meaning no one had to pay a dime. When I first started this project, I had little to no idea what the first aspect of filmmaking was, and now i can tell you every step off of the top of my head: including some of the different jobs that go into making a feature length film. Luckily, my group did not assign jobs to each other, meaning I was able to experience every aspect. Editing, acting, camerawork, everything! This allowed me to know many things about film. In terms of production, our group of course went through our bumpy bits in the beginning, but through the leadership of our teachers and the determination of all of us, we were able to streamline production, however much production that may mean. We were all directors by the end of the project, and we were all extremely proud on what seeing four idiots with a camera could do and make people laugh .

 

4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

Our main technology for this project were as follows: a camera and its accessories, and a computer with pinnacle studios installed. First, we made our storyboard on paper but uploaded it to our blogspots so we could see it from anywhere, even outside where we were filming. Blogspot allowed us to keep and store essential story and acting information for later use so we did not have to lug around an absurd amount of papers for one little project. The bread and butter of this project, though, of witch it would not be completed without, was the camera. Our camera was a small little dinky digital camera, but the lens was fantastic and the footage always came out great. The only problem our team had with the camera was the time constraints put upon us by its battery, with a meager life of around 2 hours. Ours, sadly, was not fully charged, and we were restricted to less than a class period of camera. Luckily, this proved to be more than enough for our ragtag group of heroes to complete the footage in a mere day to their exquisite standard. While the raw footage strung together would make a passible commercial on its own, we decided to spice it up a bit with pinnacle studios, allowing us to use royalty free smoke transitions and surprisingly catchy music that went in our comercial without inner team debate. All in all, technology was such an important part of our project we could not have hoped to finish it without our tools. Learning and using this tech to the best of our ability was separated from the development process, but a treat nonetheless.